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It’s A Fact: Forty-one Percent of Gay Men and Bi’s Bareback

And frankly that’s just the number who are willing to admit it, so chances are the total could be a lot higher. Published in the magazine AIDS, the study included info from a national HIV survey and showed in the space of nine years, the percentage of gay guys who did it raw rose from 29% to 41%.

So what does all this say? That the propaganda from the health authorities and gay health activist organizations about using condoms is going nowhere and perhaps was never all that effective.

Hell, l was living and playing in New York City, one of the epicenters of the AIDS crisis in the early eighties and was a frequent visitor to the baths where during the Sodom and Gomorrah seventies everything happened. As soon as the great medical minds figured out that this very, very bad virus was transmitted through bodily fluids, boys just stopped having traditional suck and fuck sex and retrograded to the j-o variety. At least for a while till the hormones and lust overtook us again.

Interestingly, unlike San Francisco which closed its baths, the bathhouses in New York City remained open though l remember the infamous St. Marks Bath being shut down either by the authorities or because the boys stopped coming

Before AIDS hit the deck, one barfly buddy of mine would boast about the disease of the month he had caught fucking like a bunny. My favorite was amoebas. I lost touch with him soon after that but l suspect Bobby Rosenberg was among the first wave to go six feet under.

So why the increase? It’s not because of the resurgence of bareback porn as one of the naive female readers of my erotic gay fiction hypothesized. Nor could the study correlate increased use of PrEP or other prophylactics with decreased condom use.

So are we just becoming more reckless? Think the disease has peaked when in hotspots like South Florida it’s continually on the rise? Or are fooled by the pharm propaganda that if you get infected, just pop a pill and everything will be fine?

If that’s the prevailing view, l’d like to introduce you to a couple of fifty plus boys l know who while technically still alive look like my father and are beginning to fall apart inside. After all, the track record of HIV drugs is only about 20 years old, so who knows at what point in time they will no longer be effective, and that assumes you’re leading a clean life, meth free. And stronger, more powerful drugs only mean your liver and kidneys have to work even harder.

As I’ve said many times before, in the end it’s your decision on whether or not to BB, not his.